Page 40 - FCW, April 2017

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April 2017 FCW.COM
FCW Perspectives
CDM in the trenches
DHS, GSA and customer agencies discuss deployment efforts and ideas for future improvement
The Continuous Diagnostics and Miti- gation program — a $6 billion effort to better secure networks and systems across government — is a compli- cated beast. It covers some 169,000 tools and services, and it is managed by the Department of Homeland Secu- rity’s National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD) while the General Services Administration runs the acqui- sition contract.
Funding is provided to most civil- ian agencies. It flows through DHS and covers most, though not all, of what’s required to deploy CDM. And although Phase 2 of the program is just getting underway, the current contract expires next summer, so current deployment efforts are also informing plans for the next-generation acquisition vehicle.
FCW gathered CDM stakeholders on
March 23 to discuss their experienc- es to date. The discussion was on the record but not for individual attribution (see Page 27 for a list of participants). Here’s what they had to say.
Show me the money
A common refrain was that many agen- cies weren’t prepared to provide the additional resources needed to fully implement the DHS-funded CDM tools.
One executive said many compo- nents in her agency “didn’t put a line item in their budget for CDM because they just knew” NPPD would pay for it. They quickly realized that other ele- ments were still needed. For integra- tion, “you’ve got a program manage- ment piece, you’ve got to deploy it,” she said. “Somebody’s got to manage it. What about the hosting services?”
Another agency official recalled that “I had to convey to everybody, ‘OK, so we’re going to get the engineering sup- port with Phase 2, but we’re going to have to provide our own hardware.’” That instantly put CDM in competition with other projects, he added, “because everybody needs hardware.”
Budget uncertainty has compounded agencies’ challenges, several partici- pants said. The hassles that accompany short-term funding are not unique to CDM, but stopgap funding, personnel freezes and likely budget cuts could all hit “at a time where we’re starting to transition from the license and mainte- nance costs that DHS is covering over to the agencies,” one executive said.
“I know that the Office of Manage- ment and Budget has been working to make sure that the agencies have built